Joan
Two German ladies in their 80s puzzled over the inscription yesterday evening and confessed themselves somewhat baffled! They both read the old Fraktur handwriting perfectly, but said that the third word just doesn't make sense! The same response came from the German friend whose grandmother writes to her in Fraktur.
What they all agree on is that the first two parts in all likelihood read "A Saam", though they find that the handwriting is somewhat unconventional. An "A" standing alone could only be an initial, as there is no such word in German.
The last word seems to read something like "Gebuhrem". Much as we wanted it to be either "geboren" (born) or "Geburtstag" (birthday) we just couldn't fiddle it. There is a German word which in the plural reads "Gebühren", but that would mean "charges" or "fees", and in any case the writer has correctly, though rather late in the word, included the Umlaut (two dots over the vowel) in März, so it seems unlikely that he/she would omit the Umlaut in "Gebühren"!
Yes, "Grabstein" means gravestone, but I can't even with a lot of imagination twist these letters into that. I would agree that the third word could be a place name, perhaps a birthplace, but which??
The upper/lower case business comes from the fact that all nouns, as well as proper names and the polite form of address, are spelled with a capital letter in German. This is a relatively modern development, as I believe the brothers Grimm (of the fairy tales) in the early 1800s didn't use capitals at all in their writing, even to start a sentence, and they were linguists and published grammar books!
Sorry about the excess of information, but I just can't help being a teacher! Sorry, too, that I and my German friends have been unable to solve the mystery. Maybe, just maybe, someone else will have a crack at this.
Gillg
